Under a Blue Sun
FOOD & FOOTAGE – Independent movies in combination with food
14 OCTOBER 2026 / starting from 18:30
ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany
If cinema needs props, war uses weapons; if war deploys soldiers, cinema hires extras. For one, the desert is a location, and for the other, it is a warzone. But in both, the desert too often serves as a colonial stage for spectacle. The spectacle is Rambo III, shot in 1986 in the Negev/Naqab desert to simulate Afghanistan. The Israeli military was a key collaborator, providing the film production weapons as props, soldiers as extras, and militarised lands as vast desert locations.
In the 1980s, a Palestinian Bedouin artist, Bashir Abu Rabia, was hired to create special effects for Rambo III. Today, Bashir returns to the desert locations, where he finds material remnants and debris left behind in the sand. In the mute and grainy desert background, Bashir sees the Naqab Desert in the south of Israel/Palestine and a document of his dispossessed tribal land. Once the frames of the film Rambo are cracked and repositioned, they can shed light on erased lives and on intimate relations to land.
Under a Blue Sun tells how desert lands in Israel/Palestine were converted into military training zones and adopted as locations for big-budget action films. It is about the imaginaries projected onto the surface of the desert land and the possibility of finding a 'Rambo' for Palestine.
Under a Blue Sun
by Daniel Mann
80'00''
France, 2024
Hebrew, English, Arabic with English subtitles
This edition of FOOD & FOOTAGE is curated by Hadas Kedar as part of the project Learning from the Desert. Hadas is joined by film maker Daniel Mann for a discussion after the screening.
Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer whose work explores images and imaginaries of land and environment, often in relation to colonial and neocolonial politics, military occupation, and extractivism. Mann's films have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals and institutions, including Berlinale, Visions du Réel, The Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Documenta Madrid, Karlovy Vary, DOC NYC, IDFA, the Hong Kong Film Festival and the ICA in London. His most recent film, 'The Recce', premiered at the 2026 Berlinale and received the Fugas Award at Documenta Madrid.
Mann’s first monograph, Occupying Habits: Media as Warfare in Israel/Palestine (Bloomsbury and SOAS Palestine Centre, 2023), examines images of colonial violence in the West Bank, Palestine. His second monograph, Hot Locations: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier (forthcoming with University of California Press, 2027), explores the desert as a distinctive extractive formation within cinema: an environment framed, captured, rendered, and circulated as both a war zone and an extraterrestrial world. Mann was a Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London, and a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation.
Samar Abu-Fraiha will develop the accompanying menu around bedouin traditional gastronomies.
The film screening is free of charge; purchasing a meal is not required to attend the movie night.
The price is 15 euros per person (drinks not included).
Doors open at 18:30
Dinner will be served at 19:00. Please be on time as the dinner will be seated and start with a short perfomance.
The film starts at 20:00
